Links

The cops don’t like that Erin Chmielewski chased down the scumbag who stole a charity donation box from the place where she works.

When she ran him down, the petite restaurant worker pulled out the only threat at her disposal.

If the guy didn’t put the container full of money down … she was going to continue to follow him.

The guy must have known what I know: The smaller the woman, the bigger the pain in your ….

Guy put the container down. She took it back to the restaurant.

If you think of life in terms of box scores, this incident goes into the record books like this:

CIVILIZATION: 1

LAWLESS SCUMBAGS: 0

But, of course, the police delivered their standard lecture to this decent citizen, the way they always do after every such incident.

You could have got hurt.

Leave it up to us.

I think they have it printed on a special card, or something.

Of course, the cops are the same people whose professional associations spearheaded the outlawing of all kinds of non-lethal devices that private citizens could use to protect themselves from criminal scumbags, from purse-sized canisters of pepper spray to stun guns.

Police lobbyists also periodically try to prevent law-abiding citizens from owning soft body armour. Which is about as passive a self-defence measure there is and which was … drum roll, please … invented not by a cop nor somebody thinking about cops.

It was invented by a convenience store clerk for other convenience store clerks because for a while there in the U.S., being a convenience store clerk was about as safe as walking foot patrol in Kandahar province.

But never mind. Better you should be helpless.

We seem to run lots of stories about responsible citizens acting … well. Like responsible citizens. If there are an equal number of cases in which people who stand up to criminals are winding up dead or in hospital … somebody’s keeping those stories to themselves.

The problem with police delivering a lecture to this brave, little woman is this: They weren’t there.

Which is the essence of virtually every crime story.

The. Police. Weren’t. There.

Because. They’re. Never. There.

In the real world, you are your own first responder.

I guess I get where the cops are coming from. But it’s not a good place because it denies that societies are largely self-regulating systems. It denies the fact that, by and large, not only do we look after ourselves but that we should look after ourselves.

Theirs seems a worldview that, at best, can be described as offensively paternalistic.

It also denies the facts. In the only major, peer-reviewed study of how Canadians use firearms for self-defence — which is only a minuscule part of the crime picture in this country — the researcher found that as many as 37,000 times a year, Canadians used guns to defend themselves from criminals.

And a great many of those incidents went unreported.

Why?

For the same reason an attempted mugging or rape of a friend of mine went unreported.

She finds herself in a deserted parking structure after a shopping trip. The scruffy guy in the hoodie passes and she gets the bad vibe and she has her vial of pepper spray in her hand and turns ready to nail him in the face.

She was just in time because he was already coming back at her.

He looks shocked and steps back. She says: “There’s easier targets than me.” He nods and walks away to victimize someone else.

She didn’t report the incident because she knew that if she told the police the truth, at the very least she’d lose the now-illegal weapon that made her safe. Or she’d be facing criminal charges, which is not unlikely.

I think the kinds of lectures cops deliver when citizens step up to protect themselves goes a considerable distance to estranging us from the people we pay who are supposed to be our partners in creating a civil society.

About the author

Other Stories

Just making it rain.Smiling and giggling and just plain giddy about spending money WE don't have.So I was sitting the newsroom with this look of abject horror on my face.Seeing Joe Ceci deliver the Alberta budget was like watching some shaman squatting in a loin cloth throw chicken bones in the dirt and pretend to commune with The Divine.

My old man was kind of a cross between
Randolph Scott
(Google it, young people), Quint Asper (Aren’t
you glad
there’s Google?) and the guys behind South Park
(If you
don’t know their names already, that’s just sad.)